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AJAX and making Customers Feel Good
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Date: 7 October, 2005 - 07:00

I've been working on a project for one my biggest customers now for many months. The system is huge, has automated a huge amount of work previously done by hand, and quite a bit on its own depending on specific business rules. One of the things it does is pull together various bits and pieces of information and puts it together into a single item for further processing.

The difficulty has been that there are so many rules, so many different conditions, and a variety of other things that affect the output, it gets to be quite difficult to test and preview the items. On Tuesday, I had an idea... AJAX.

There are two primary pieces of data that form the core of everything else. One is automatically generated from data coming into the system. The other is user-configurable on a case by case basis but has some default values.

Therefore, I built a simple preview screen, both for the default values and the complete object. It simply pulls all the pieces of the object and displays them similarly to the final output.

It doesn't do anything complicated at all, but what it does do makes the users feel good. It shows the Customer what they can expect to see if they continue on with the values they've selected and most importantly it allows them to see the their changes reflected in realtime. The power of this has been amazing.

After only being deployed for an hour, an interface previously called "clunky" has been called "beautiful" and "elegant". All of this from a bit of simple AJAX that took 3 hours to write, test, and deploy. Where's the downside?


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the downside...

Submitted by Duane Gran (not verified) on 7 October, 2005 - 11:09.

The downside would be if you got hit by a bus. Aside from this being an obvious Bad Thing (tm) to happen to you, the next bloke who needs to maintain the code could be in an uproar because AJAX inherently mixes concerns between the controller and the view. Every little piece of javascript that validates a form does this as well, so there is a pretty good precedent for trading purity for a better user experience.

I like AJAX, but since you asked for a downside I thought I would share. If the user is happy with the solution, *and* they understand that AJAX is a tad brittle to maintain, all should be well.

AJAX and Smarty

Submitted by Nola (not verified) on 7 October, 2005 - 12:02.

I've been experimenting with mixing AJAX and Smarty, so I can seperate the data and content. So far, working pretty well and makes having to write mixed php/js/html alot easier.

Ain't it beautiful!

Submitted by Ben Bryant (not verified) on 11 October, 2005 - 19:58.

I watched the video about the new MS Mail (aka the new Hotmail) over on Channel 9 which uses AJAX and looks totally TOTALLY awesome, may be I feel that way because I can't stand hotmail now, and I think the gmail interface is lousy though speedy in some ways. The only concern is whether the new MS Mail will scale well on the ASP.NET 2.0 platform from 2k concurrent logons it is doing so far to the 30 mil peak that hotmail does.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=118322

AJAX

Submitted by William Huang (not verified) on 5 December, 2005 - 12:39.

It's a great technology, but I think ideal the AJAX use is not abuse it. Example: specific fields that needs to be updated in realtime, needs AJAX. There's no need to AJAX the entire application, in my opinion. In the end, anyway, you must do a validation on the PHP file that will be receiving the entire data.

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